Text: Hebrews 12:1—3

Topic: What Are Reasons to Persevere

Introduction:

• • We Christians often lose the enthusiasm and joy of our salvation.
  • Illustration: Brown tells the humorous tale of a man who gave his mule a pill to boost its spirits, then had to take one himself to catch the animal.

We can be encouraged by the saints that went before us.

• • Illustration: Brown dramatizes the cloud of witnesses from the hall of faith in Hebrews 11 as they cheer on the downtrodden, the sinful, and the disheartened.
  • Illustration: Hugh Latimer was awed by the martyrs before him, discovered faith, and found strength in the memory of them to be martyred himself.

Struggling with disobedience makes us stronger.

• • Illustration: Sammy's inner tube may have slowed him from jumping the fence, but once he dropped it, his flight was all the swifter.

We always have a choice in our behavior.

• • Illustration: A drug user was convinced that he had no choice but to be hooked on drugs until Brown explained that the choice was, and is, his.
  • Illustration: The pastor insisted he needed to be more spiritual, the psychologist insisted it wasn't his fault, but the boy showed him he simply had to stop sitting on the tack.

We can draw encouragement from a God who has suffered through what we suffer.

• • Illustration: Two radio executives take comfort in one another's arms during an earthquake, until one realizes her comforter has never been through a quake before either.
  • Illustration: A North Carolina pastor discovers a poignant truth when he finds the words "God has cancer" inscribed on the bathroom wall.

God is aggressively working out our perfection.

• • Illustration: Brown shares his personal story of God's relentless work to destroy Brown's public façade and replace it with an honest, humble preacher.

We have the added comfort of a Son interceding for us to the Father.

• • Illustration: A civil war soldier is lost, forgotten, and hurting until a little boy befriends him and takes him to his father (the little boy turns out to be Todd Lincoln, the President's son).